Obama Bids Farewell to Space Shuttle as Florida to Lose Thousands of Jobs

By Hans Nichols -
Apr 29, 2011

President Barack Obama is set to
bid a personal farewell to America’s manned space shuttle at
Cape Canaveral today, as Florida’s “space coast” prepares to
say goodbye to thousands of NASA jobs in a state crucial to
Obama’s re-election.

Obama is scheduled to watch the Endeavour’s final lift-off,
the second-to-last shuttle launch in the program’s 30-year
history. Also in the audience will be U.S. Representative
Gabrielle Giffords, who is still recovering from a head wound
she suffered in a mass shooting in Tucson, Arizona, on Jan. 8.
Her husband, Navy Captain Mark Kelly, will be commanding the
Endeavour on its 14-day mission to the International Space
Station.

“At the Cape they stand to lose seven or eight thousand
jobs in the next year because of the shuttle program ending,”
said Bretton Alexander, the president of the Commercial
Spaceflight Federation, a Washington-based trade association of
companies promoting commercial human spaceflight. Obama and
Senator Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who in 1986 flew one
shuttle mission as a payload specialist, “are taking a lot of
heat for that, but that was going to happen no matter what,” he
said.

The shuttle’s demise was set in motion by President George W. Bush in 2004, and Obama’s plan to retool NASA’s mission kept
the decision in effect.

The president has directed the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration to focus on developing rocket systems that
might eventually take humans into deep space, while relying on
private companies to build spacecraft to ferry astronauts -- and
potentially tourists -- to the space station.

“The space shuttle is coming to an end and it’s really
pretty far past its sell-by date,” said Musk, whose company has
a $1.6 billion NASA contract to deliver cargo to the space
station. “It’s an amazing work of engineering, but it sort of
architecturally is very expensive.”

The goal of the new system should be to lower the cost per
mission and the improve safety, he said, noting the catastrophic
failures aboard two shuttles that resulted in the deaths of 14
astronauts.

The space shuttle costs an average of about $450 million
per mission, according to NASA. Musk estimates that SpaceX
flights will cost $140 million.

New Era

“The public should see this as a dawning of a new era,
which will hopefully be a significant improvement in the
technology of space travel,” he said.

For some former astronauts, the end of the shuttle program
should be an opportunity to revitalize space exploration.

“If we had evolved it, instead of just using it, we could
have got the launch cost down and made it a safe vehicle,” said
Loren Acton, a former astronaut and currently a professor at
Montana State University in Bozeman.

“It’s a tremendous spacecraft,” he said. “I will be
sorry to see it go.”

In his fiscal year 2012 budget, Obama proposed $18.7
billion for NASA, $1.5 billion less than his request last year.
He also has ended NASA’s Constellation program, developed during
the Bush administration, which would have built spacecraft for a
return to the moon by 2020. Instead, he is seeking to focus NASA
on exploring deep space and sending humans to Mars by the mid-
2030s.

Consequences for Florida

Florida Republicans have criticized Obama’s approach.

While today’s launch “is an opportunity to celebrate
Endeavour’s history and the brave people who have made it a
proud one, it is also a bittersweet occasion,” Senator Marco Rubio wrote in the Orlando Sentinel on April 26. “The
president’s space policy is jeopardizing America’s longstanding
commitment to manned space exploration. This has serious
consequences for Florida.”

The job losses in the space program will add to the woes of
a state that has struggled to recover from the recession. While
the Bloomberg Florida Index (BFLX) of stocks has gained 9.8 percent
over the past year, the state’s unemployment rate is at 11.1
percent, compared with the national average of 8.8 percent.

Florida, the fourth-biggest U.S. state by population, has
been a swing state in national elections and is a target for
both parties in 2012.

Political Prize

Obama won Florida with 51 percent of the vote in 2008.
Republican Bush claimed it in the two prior presidential
elections, including the contested -- and pivotal -- balloting
in 2000. In 2012, Florida will have added importance because
population gains will add two more Electoral College votes,
giving whoever wins the state 29 of the 270 votes that are
required for victory in the presidential election.

Planning to watch the launch with the president is
Giffords, who made the trip to Florida from the Houston facility
where she is undergoing rehabilitation. The Arizona Democrat was
shot in the head during the attack in which six people were
killed and 13, including Giffords, were wounded. She has begun
to speak and is standing on her own, according to the Arizona
Republic.

Before arriving in Florida, Obama stopped in Alabama to
view the damage from some of the tornadoes that tore through the
U.S. Southeast. Almost 300 people were killed in six states,
according to an Associated Press tally, with the heaviest toll
in Alabama.

“I’ve never seen devastation like this,” Obama said in
Tuscaloosa. “We are going to do everything we can to help these
communities rebuild.”